A functional truism of eighteenth-century French cartography is that it enshrined a topographical way of understanding space—that it mapped with growing precision the features and dimensions of land surfaces.[1] The famous Cassini Map, under way for much of the century, was the first project to use triangulation to survey all…
In recent years, many American museums and their staff have staged revisionist interventions, urging general visitors and scholars to reframe, reimagine, and reinterpret European collections. In “Re-Presenting Art History: An Unfinished Process,” art historian Cristina Baldacci ruminates on the prefix “re-” as a hermeneutic tool strategically employed by curators to…
Jennifer Van Horn The bitter cold at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, during the Continental Army’s winter encampment of 1777–1778 has become part of American mythology. That brutal chill, borne by George Washington and the soldiers whom he commanded in the American Revolution, was immortalized as bodily sacrifice for the cause of…
Sylvia Houghteling In his dictionary of Persian words, written in Delhi around 1745, the writer and lexicographer Anand Ram Mukhlis pauses on the entry for takhta-i yakh, a word that means a “sheet of ice” (with takhta often referring to a flat plane, board, or surface and yakh meaning ice).…
Kaitlin Grimes As the official coronation chair of the Oldenburg monarchy, the Anointment Chair of Absolutism sits regally at the end of a grand hall at Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen, surrounded with rich tapestries, sumptuous velvets, and opulently ornamented walls and ceilings (Fig. 1). Attributed to Bendix I Grodtschilling (1620–1690),…
Alper Metin Throughout the early modern period, wealth and the desire for domestic comfort shaped an intensely intertwined yet intricate set of concepts centered on the hearth. For Western Europe, scholars have investigated quite thoroughly the increasing demand for warmth and the evolution of heating systems.[1] The situation in the…
Etienne Wismer Glaciers do not only consist of ice. In their porous spaces, they contain mineral particles, oxygen, and, ultimately, snow and water. Carl Ludwig Hackert’s Vue de la Source de l’Arveron (1781) shows a glacier crisscrossed by meltwater streams and numerous erratic blocks (Fig. 1). Hackert’s depiction embodies the…
In August 2022, while visiting the new permanent exhibition “Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle, le commerce atlantique et l’esclavage” at the Musée d’Aquitaine, I encountered a viscerally racist image (Fig. 1). I say that I “encountered” it because the print stages itself as a meeting between the subject and the viewer by…
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). 704 pages. $35.00. ISBN: 9780374157357. When every day brings more bad news about the prospects for human life on our planet, readers will find a welcome reprieve in David…